Move over Dolly, here comes Gene the bull
Wisconsin-based breeding giant ABS Global Inc. claimed a world first last month when it announced that a healthy six-month-old bull calf named Gene had been cloned using ABS' proprietary technology.
The technology now exists to develop and produce identical cows with identical genetics to produce large quantities of milk with finely tuned feeding programs, or tender, cookie-cutter steaks from fast-growing beef cattle, according to ABS.
The new technology Gene the bull calf represents can be used to produce large numbers of cattle in a cost-effective manner, says Michael D. Bishop, vice-president of research for Infigen, ABS Global's new company, formed to commercialize cloning technologies.
But don't expect to see this high-tech genetic material advertised by St. Jacob's ABC, ABS Global's selling arm in Ontario, any time soon.
Infigen will give low priority to breeding cattle for commercial herds, says ABS chief operating officer Jim Weber. Making pharmaceuticals that can be extracted from special cow herds gets first priority, followed by the making of high nutrition products called nutraceuticals, and then xenotransplanations, human-compatible organs to be used in transplants.
The ABS technology is the breakthrough that the scientific community has sought for 10 years, says breeder John Gibson, associate professor, animal science, University of Guelph. Gene the bull calf is the product of stem cell culturing. Gibson says culturing represents the breakthrough that animal breeders have been seeking to achieve for nearly a decade.
Culturing success had been achieved only in certain strains of mice.
In culturing, cells are grown for months in petri dishes and injected with selected genes. The resulting immature embryo is put into a recipient for normal gestation. Scientists have tried to do this in other mammals, but had so far failed, Gibson says.
Gibson explains that stem cells have the capacity to grow into a full animal when manipulated. Most cells are programmed to do something very specific, Gibson says. "Lots of genes have been switched off and can't be switched on again."
There are a few cells, especially in embryos, that are stem cells. In Edinburgh, Scotland, Pharmaceutical Proteins Ltd. (PPL) scientists found some cells could be stem cells. They eventually produced an exact genetic reproduction named Dolly.
Making Dolly involved no culture. Scientists copied the sheep, which was an achievement in itself. But it was an inefficient form of cloning, Gibson says. Of 450 attempts to clone sheep, only one succeeded. "Clearly, it is a long, long, way from being commercially useful."
Still, Gibbon cites an industry rumour that the tight-lipped PPL group now has stem cell culture for sheep.
The stem cell cloning of mice works only on a few strains. Gibson speculates that clone culturing might have to be worked out for each individual breed of cattle.
The Edinburgh group is using cloning to produce a human protein in milk, which can be extracted and made into pharmaceutical products, such as a human blood clotting protein. The market is worth nearly $1 billion a year, Gibson says.
ABS says that in pharmaceutical applications, recombinant or synthetic proteins can be produced by inserting into the genetic material of an animal a foreign gene that directs the production of a desired protein in the milk of a lactating cow. A pharmaceutical can then be extracted from that milk.
There's more potential for farmers on back concessions in producing nutraceuticals. One of those nutrition enhancing products might be lactose- free milk, aimed at consumers whose digestive systems are intolerant to regular cow's milk.
The implications for the livestock breeding industry are enormous. A few high-producing cows cloned in commercial numbers could dominate the dairy industry. Within a few years of their introduction, farmers would have to use the clones to keep up with their neighbours.
"I'm glad I'm not in the cattle breeding business right now," says Gibson. "I would want to make damn sure I had part of the action. If you aren't part of it, you won't be in business in three, four, five years."-DS
U.S. court approves BST label
An out-of-court settlement in Illinois has breathed new life into the BST
labelling issue in the U.S.
Last month, makers of natural dairy products won the right to label their products as BST-free in Illinois, one of a handful of states that prevented food makers from mentioning BST on the product label. Since processors fought for this right under the first amendment to the constitution, it is expected that other states will also allow the controversial labels on their state's shelves.
When BST was approved for use in the U.S. in 1993, the federal Food and Drug Administration left it up to states to decide whether they would regulate labelling of foods containing milk from treated cows.
The states of Illinois, Nevada, Oklahoma and Hawaii banned labelling entirely, and threatened to seized labelled product on store shelves. A coalition of processors led by ice-cream maker Ben & Jerry's launched the lawsuit 15 months ago.
With even a few states banning the labels, natural food makers who market products on a national scale say they were unable to use the labels they wanted on their products. -DS
Bogus U.S. butterfat scoops ice cream sales
By DON STONEMAN
Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) charges that ice-cream makers using a loophole in tariffs to import a butteroil and sugar mix from the U.S. are costing Canada's dairy farmers millions of dollars in sales.
Under the classifications imposed by Revenue Canada, the blends, 49-per- cent butteroil and 51-per-cent sugar, do not require an import permit, and are not subject to a tariff rate quota.
During the last dairy year, which ended July 31, imported butteroil-sugar blends represented more than three million kg. of pure butterfat, about two per cent of market share quota. If Canadian producers had access to this market, it would have been worth $17 million in sales from the farm gate.
The pace of imports is considerably higher this year, and could cost farmers as much as $30 million in lost sales. It's a heavy blow for dairy farmers who are still smarting from a 2.6-per-cent cut in quotas, largely because of reduced demand for milk to be made into industrial products such as ice-cream.
The president of DFC, Barron Blois, of Kennetcook, Nova Scotia, says the significant increase in imports this year has not gone unnoticed by producers who just took a quota cut.
"We are not prepared to stand by and see it continue to grow," Blois says. He understands that the majority of the imports are coming into Ontario, Canada's largest consumer market.
Sugar and butteroil separately can't enter Canada without a heavy duty. There is a tariff rate quota on butterfat, which increases the tariff on the product as the volume increases. And there is a countervailing duty on pure sugar. However, a combination of the two products can legally enter Canada at a very low rate of duty.
Importation of the butteroil-sugar blend on a large scale started in 1995, with the implementation of the World Trade Organization. DFC is lobbying Revenue Minister Herb Dhaliwal to change the tariff line under which this product is imported, as it is clearly used as a butter substitute.
Government officials have expressed some concerns about antagonizing the American dairy industry, still smarting after losing a NAFTA trade panel dispute to Canada last year. The trade panel decided the high tariff walls erected by Canada when GATT Article XI was abolished two years ago could stand, even though tariffs between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico were abolished under the NAFTA agreement signed earlier. The tariffs protect Canada's dairy and poultry farmers from a feared flood of low-priced imports from the U.S.
The DFC's lawyers say the tariff rate on butteroil and sugar can be changed legally.
Last month, Blois and other DFC leaders met with new Agriculture Minister Lyle Vanclief to get his support on the issue. Blois says Vanclief "understands the issue."
DFC has asked every province's producer group to protest the current tariff rate to its provincial minister of agriculture, as well as to the federal ministers of trade and agriculture.
Blois says ice-cream sales are down across Canada, perhaps partly because lower-quality, lower-cost ingredients are being used in products this year. "It is reasonable to think it is contributing to some of the reduction in the quota cut," Blois says.
Producers have enjoyed increases in industrial sales in the last 12 months, Blois says, but now many products are taking a downward trend.
Blois hopes to meet soon with Dhaliwal to talk about the issue. "We think that because of the seriousness we can't remain silent about it," he says.
Tom Kane, president of the Ontario Dairy Council, bristles at the comments that the increased imports are being made by Ontario processors.
Imports may be increasing, but they are not necessarily from companies located in Ontario, Kane says. He expects that Canadian processors will oppose the changes to the tariff rate on butteroil and sugar blends. "It is a legitimate source of raw material ingredients for the ice-cream market, and other markets as well. We have had access to it in the past and we don't see any reason that it should be discontinued at this time."
The cost of ice-cream would increase in Canada if raw ingredient cost rose, Kane says. "There's nothing illegal being done at this time. We see no reason to change it."
Facts for urbanites. Farmers get codes of practice to show them how they
should operate. Urbanites need factsheets, to show them how farmers
should operate, says Ontario Farm Animal Council (OFAC) chairman Mike
Cooper. Five of these factsheets have already been developed for five
livestock commodities: beef, farmed deer, pigs, poultry and sheep. The
challenge is to get them into the hands of the general public. "They
should be in every waiting room in urban Canada," says Cooper, a
Cambridge veal producer and packer. The four-page factsheets are a
concise overview of the management guidelines contained in the
Recommended Codes of Practice for Livestock, the nationally-developed
guidelines for the care and handling of different species of livestock. The
codes were produced by the Canadian Agri-Food Research Council, with
each code committee having representation from producers, packers,
government research and humane societies. Because the factsheets are
easier to read and cheaper to reproduce, they can be distributed to a
wider audience than the full codes. Seven provinces, including Ontario, are
now distributing the factsheets, which can be obtained from the Ontario
Ministry of Agriculture and Food and Rural Affairs, commodity groups, or
the Internet at www.carc-crac.ca.
Mad squirrel and mad cows. The debate over the cause and spread of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), also known as Mad Cow Disease, keeps getting, well, squirrelier. Dr. Joseph R. Berger, head of Neurology at the University of Kentucky, has discovered a common medical link between squirrel meat consumption in Kentucky, Mad Cow Disease in England and Kuru, the illness that destroyed the brains of cannibals in New Guinea. Three patients in Kentucky, later found to be stricken with Creutzfeldt Jacob Disease, admitted to consuming squirrels brains. The university has asked for the brains of 100 squirrels to be submitted for examination and research. CJD is thought to have spread to humans through the consumption, intentional or otherwise, of the brains of infected cows. Last month, another victim of a new form of CJD was diagnosed in Britain. The victim had been a vegetarian for 16 years, increasing fears that the disease might have an even longer incubation period than originally thought.
Families of the 168 people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing have filed civil lawsuits against the companies which sold the ammonium nitrate fertilizer allegedly used to make the bomb that tore the face off the federal building in 1995.
The plaintiffs allege that two companies, Mid-Kansas Coop and Farmland Industries, sold "explosive" grade rather than fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate, and have been accused of violating Kansas and federal laws regarding the sale of ammonium nitrate.
Farmland Industries is the largest farmer-owned co-operative in North American and has six Canadian member co-ops, including Ontario's Hensall District Co-operative.
Lawyers for both companies maintain that the product sold was indeed fertilizer, saying that it is unfortunate that the product, when combined with other ingredients, can produce such a devastating effect.
The lawsuits allege that two 2,000-pound shipments of ammonium nitrate purchased from Mid-Kansas in 1994 were used to construct the bomb. The product was supplied to Mid-Kansas by Farmland.
Farmland officials have called the lawsuits "frivolous", noting that a federal judge has already dismissed a previous lawsuit filed against the ammonium nitrate manufacturer shortly after the bombing.
Lawyers representing the plaintiffs include Johnnie Cochran Jr., O.J. Simpson's lead attorney.
Though Elsie began life like many other Jersey calves, she ended up an
icon. "She was the nation's favourite lactress," wrote Judith Gaines of The
Boston Globe.
Born in 1932, she was christened "You'll do Lobelia" to blue-blooded parents, immigrants from the island of Jersey. Like many stars, her name was changed for the sake of her career, which took off when Elsie starting winning ribbons at state fairs and was spotted by an agent for Borden's Milk, who initially leased her for one year for US$2,500. She starred in commercials and in magazine ads.
Elsie was so popular that for the 1940 World's Fair, she resided in an elegant boudoir, complete with four-poster canopy bed, tables made from churns and a wheelbarrow converted into a chaise longue. She received seven million visitors.
She went on to conquer Hollywood, playing Buttercup in Louisa May Alcott's Little Men. She worked with many actors, including Boris Karloff. She only stayed in the best hotels and was presented with the keys to 32 cities, including New York.
The barn at Hill Farm in Brookfield, Massachusetts, where she was born and raised, has been donated to the Audubon Society to become part of a wildlife sanctuary. Elsie's star cache is bound to attract more attention to the birds.
According to her obituary, Elsie died "while travelling in New Jersey". Her touring van was hit by a truck. She was ceremoniously buried at Hill Farm. - SH